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Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

tripexpert.com

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Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#31

Post by iamdann »

Holbein wrote: post #28

Great site! So how do you come up with the TripExpert score? Do you read every review, map it manually to a number, then get the average? Or is it more like Rotten Tomatoes where each review only gets a shot at a thumps up or thumps down, and then you average those? Btw: Slight coding error: On city pages, hotel names are overlaid over the preview icon, which makes them very hard to read on Safari 5.1.

Thanks for the bug report.

We have an algorithm that looks at a large number of factors (number of reviews, each reviewer's unique denotation system, number of hotels in a destination, sentiment, etc) and calculates the number.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#32

Post by hoopism »

"Finally, hotel reviews you can trust."

I thought the beauty of TripADvisor and the like is that it does away with the old travel guides. Guides are written by people with even more questionable motive and are quickly outdated. Not sure how many times I have been saved from bad experience by reading a recent reviews saying "BEWARE Hotel is under construction for next month..." or something current like that.

Maybe there value in both... not for me.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#33

Post by saryant »

I like this.

The biggest problem with TripAdvisor hotel reviews (besides fake reviews) is that varied background of the individual reviewer.

Witness how a Holiday Inn can wind up rated higher than a Park Hyatt, simply because of the background of the majority of TA reviewers.

I've largely given up on TA for reviews. For chain hotels, I find FlyerTalk's convention of a dedicated thread per hotel or locality far more valuable, especially because those reviews are specifically from the perspective of frequent travelers rather than once-a-year flyers heading to Disneyland.

For example, 2100+ posts on every possible minute detail of the Conrad Hong Kong: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hilton-hilton-hhonors/124932-...

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#34

Post by aknicol »

saryant wrote: post #33

I like this. The biggest problem with TripAdvisor hotel reviews (besides fake reviews) is that varied background of the individual reviewer. Witness how a Holiday Inn can wind up rated higher than a Park Hyatt, simply because of the background of the majority of TA reviewers. I've largely given up on TA for reviews. For chain hotels, I find FlyerTalk's convention of a dedicated thread per hotel or locality far more v…

Yeah, I agree; in my experience, high-end hotels often get unfairly rated on TA, in large part because they often get a lot of negative reviews from people who thought that they were too expensive or offered poor value for money. They often end up ranking far too low.

FlyerTalk is a great resource, although you do have to spend a lot of time reading a lot of reviews. The advantage of an aggregator like TripExpert, with snippets from various sources all on one page, is that you can get a much better sense much more quickly of what a place is like.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#35

Post by tbrick855 »

atmosx wrote: post #21

Out of curiosity how do these websites work? (e.g. like booking.com) They build an API and the HOTEL connects it's system this API and then info about rooms/scheduling/prices/pictures are available? The financial goes by % I guess. You get a % for every booking through your website. But what happens on the technical side?!

TripExpert is using expedia's affiliate program. You can signup as an affiliate in a few minutes. They give you a link that takes your users to expedia's site to complete the booking. You get a small percentage of the bookings made via your link.

Hotel.com which is owned by expedia connects to hotels via a Global Distribution System (GDS) like Sabre or Pegasus. All reasonable sized hotel's connect to one of the GDS's (there are 3-4) and travel agents and OTA's like expedia and priceline also connect to them. Getting access to one of the GDS systems takes time and costs a lot. The GDS's speak XML using the Open Travel Alliance's spec. Travel agents typically make a 10% commission on books they make. Hotels pay the commission to the TA and usually a couple of dollars per booking to the GDS. Expedia and the other big OTA's do it differently, making deals with each hotel company and charge much higher commissions.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#36

Post by jussy »

Outstanding execution could be smoother in terms of getting to the booking.

have you considered an I'm feeling lucky function?

Do you have an API that other developers or designers can extend?

Have you considered other verticals such as cruises and tours?

Hope it goes well guys love to hear from you what the conversion rate from users.

hutch

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#37

Post by avalaunch »

Really well done, beautiful and useful site. Out of curiosity, how long did this take you to build? What stack are you using?

A couple of things I noticed:

1. After updating a search, the back button doesn't work the way I would expect it to. If I choose to look at a property and then back out it takes me to the pre-updated search whereas I would expect it to take me back to my search with filters in tact. If I don't look at a property and press the back button it takes me out of search altogether where I would expect it to take me to the pre-filtered search.

2. On the search results page, the stars confuse me. I don't know what they represent.

3. It would be nice to be able to see hotels that score below 60 (perhaps as a filter option). Budget conscious shoppers might find they are lacking options otherwise in certain cities. Sometimes you're just looking for the best of the cheapest, even if it's not a 60+ hotel.

4. From the blog page, I think the TripExpert logo should take you to the main TripExpert home page, not the TripExpert blog home page. I see the Visit TripExpert link but considering that is (probably) the primary action you're probably hoping for, I think it shouldn't be hidden in the nav like that.

5. I was also initially confused when I added a filter and the search results didn't automatically update. I think that's become such a standard UX that you might want to adopt it too.

Overall though, this is really impressive. Great job. I think you have a wonderfully bright future ahead of you.

EDIT: Added 4th suggestion

EDIT 2: Added 5th suggestion

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#38

Post by aknicol »

avalaunch wrote: post #37

Really well done, beautiful and useful site. Out of curiosity, how long did this take you to build? What stack are you using? A couple of things I noticed: 1. After updating a search, the back button doesn't work the way I would expect it to. If I choose to look at a property and then back out it takes me to the pre-updated search whereas I would expect it to take me back to my search with filters in tact. If I don't…

Thanks for the feedback! Very glad to hear that you like the site so much. I agree with a lot of your suggestions, and some of them (like the filters automatically updating) we're going to be implementing soon. To answer your questions, it took about 9 months to build the site (RoR), although the majority of that time was spent developing a back-end that we use to manage all of the hotel and review data.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#39

Post by aknicol »

jussy wrote: post #36

Outstanding execution could be smoother in terms of getting to the booking. have you considered an I'm feeling lucky function? Do you have an API that other developers or designers can extend? Have you considered other verticals such as cruises and tours? Hope it goes well guys love to hear from you what the conversion rate from users. hutch

Thanks for the positive feedback! Yes, we're building an API that will let other travel sites pull our scores, rankings and review extracts. If you or anyone you know might want to make use of it, tell them to get in touch! And, yes, we're considering other verticals.

Re: Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews

#40

Post by avalaunch »

aknicol wrote: post #38
avalaunch wrote: post #37

Really well done, beautiful and useful site. Out of curiosity, how long did this take you to build? What stack are you using? A couple of things I noticed: 1. After updating a search, the back button doesn't work the way I would expect it to. If I choose to look at a property and then back out it takes me to the pre-updated search whereas I would expect it to take me back to my search with filters in tact. If I don't…

Thanks for the feedback! Very glad to hear that you like the site so much. I agree with a lot of your suggestions, and some of them (like the filters automatically updating) we're going to be implementing soon. To answer your questions, it took about 9 months to build the site (RoR), although the majority of that time was spent developing a back-end that we use to manage all of the hotel and review data.

Awesome. So what do the stars represent? Is that a different sort of rating for each hotel?
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